“Shifting your thought consumption…”

“White House press secretary Jay Carney says the Recovery Act added several million jobs and lowered the unemployment rate. According to Carney, the “goals” of the stimulus package “have been met.”

A reporter asked Carney why unemployment is at 9% and not 7%, the percentage projected if the stimulus worked. Carney dismissed the question. “We’ve said repeatedly that we don’t want to relitigate the battles of the past,” Carney told the reporter.”

But was it the act that added the jobs and lowered the unemployment rate? And if it was is it sustainable?

In order for the politicians in Washington to keep being elected, they have to convince the majority of Americans that they are “doing something”. What exactly they are doing doesn’t matter as long as the results happen. Now some may say that this is good because the results that are all that matter. But would we say the same thing about President George W. Bush running his 2004 campaign on the highest home ownership rate in the history of the United States?

Of course, now we see that it was a bubble that ended up making many Americans bankrupt. So how do we know, again assuming the government stimulus did work, that it too did not also create a bubble that will burst in the face of Barack Obama and Mr. Carney?

The arrogance of politics is that anything a President or Congress does while it is in office makes for whatever the best results in the economy are. Imagine that the boost in GDP and the lowering of unemployment was because of new technological innovation or that the country’s rich saved more money for investment and invested in new business, how would that have anything to do with building new roads by the stimulus?

It wouldn’t.

The American people must wake up first to the fact that politicians cannot create jobs. All they can do is shift valuable labor and materials to a different sector of the economy. That means that more labor and materials are being put in an industry that it would’t be in if it wasn’t for the government entering the market and bidding up the price.

So what are we losing for those falsely allocated materials and labor?